Everything you think is true

This simple phrase succinctly summarizes what I think about this life. Although probably coined by someone else, I first heard Prince drop the line prior to his musical performance at the 10th annual Webby Awards, the Internet Oscars, in 2005. I randomly caught his performance on Youtube a few months after the show. When those words came out of his mouth on my computer screen, I froze. It immediately became the centerpiece to a philosophy I can’t let go of, yet still can’t quite coherently explain. It goes something like this:

Everyone lives in two worlds: a physical world and a mental world. We enter both worlds the moment we are born. Our physical world consists of our family, our friends, our homes, our buildings, our cars – essentially everything we can see and touch. And our mental world consists of everything we think, everything that goes through our mind. It is a collection of our experiences and thoughts we continue to build upon as we live our lives.

The quote is a reminder that what we think is equally as important and real as what we see. Surely, people have solidified a solid foundation of knowledge based on many assumptions about our physical world, but there’s a lot we haven’t yet uncovered. There is still a lot we don’t know about this life, we still have war, we still pollute… we haven’t yet smoothly adapted to the forces of Mother Nature.

In a day where our highly structured Western society forces us to conform to an often well-justified degree, we’re still a bickering, polluting, destructive species. Until we do (adapt to the forces of Mother Nature), it is important we continue to question, debate and consider alternative lifestyles that see fit so that both our physical and mental worlds may reside in harmony.

The world I grew up in, in the US, taught me to listen for 16 years in school to “wise elders” who believed they knew what I needed to know so it would be less painful when I finally entered the “real world,” a realm of life that was talked about like a never-nearing monster of struggle. It also taught me to fear the things I wasn’t sure about like terrorists, or slimy immigrants coming in to steal Americans jobs. It also taught me to feel sorry for poor people in a land far away and be forever grateful for my fortunate upbringing.

I was taught listen, fear and be grateful – actions that asked little of my creative ambition or potential innovative qualities. I was taught not to believe everything I think is true, but that I know nothing and should listen to my elders who would prepare me for a world full of stress, enemies and guilt.

A few years out of school now, I’m still waiting to realize that wisdom and why it was necessary to strip me of 16 years of my youth before entering the real world. And I’m still waiting to find out who these enemies really are. All I see when I see people doing bad things, are people who because of again some well-justified reason in their own mind, are bitter and angry at the physical world around them. And they wreak havoc upon it through misplaced aggression.

If there is anything I’ve learned in the last year and a half as a junior/senior high school teacher, it’s that young people still believe they can preserve their idealism. Youth still believe everything is about sex and music. There is an optimism unmatched by anyone who has let the cynical world weigh down their shoulders. There are really too many grouches in this world for our own good. Old people are making everything all that much harder for young people to keep the faith.

And I’m trying to make that statement here – keep the faith. Everything you think is true. What you think is as important as what you see. And if you think that what you see could be better, it is your God-given responsibility to humanity to let us know. You must let the world hear the voice of opposition. If you do choose to fight the status quo, you must use reason to make your point. Reason is the single most influential tool any man can use.

When people attempt to destroy youth’s idealism with laws, titles, their level of education or amount of experience – these people have merely grown lazy and lost their ability to reason. When a person pulls those excuses into the arena of debate, you have likely won the argument. Youth must have patience though. We must patiently wait for new avenues of communication and transparency reveal the faults of our elders and unveils the true democratic soldiers of reason. When that time comes, reason will once again return as the centerpiece of good conversation and the central point of reference to deciding the course of human development.
The world must focus on an agenda, possibly an agenda that works to lessen our dependence on each other and lessen the impact we have on our planet. This would lessen the destruction of inevitable human error.
This revolution is about independence, it’s about learning how to fend for yourself and use your available resources to increase your independency. It’s about growing food and raising livestock locally. It’s about producing your own energy with the wind or the sun or both. It’s about walking more, biking more, constructing and using public transportation more and driving less. It’s about rethinking our lifestyle and retooling the machines that are supposed to make our lives easier, machines who’s impact are in sync with nature.

Of course, this is what I think. The lobbyists, the communists, even the drug dealers – they all have their point of view and they are all equally right to some degree. Because of the impenetrable presence of our mental world, we are granted the freedom to believe what we like. In the end though, the point of view that matters most is the voice that influences the greatest body of people – be it through political will, military personnel or a drug that makes you feel damn good. Be it as it may, in 2009 most people don’t have the pull that it takes to influence a large body of people. This, however, is where we sit back, stretch out our legs and wait for the Internet to make our lives more transparent.

So while we patiently wait for our antiquated system of public affairs to become more sound, youth must believe that everything they think is true, use reason to make those thoughts a reality and try to make the physical world a better, more pleasant place to live.

So thank you Prince. You are truly an individual – as a musician and as a person. In an effort to influence your mood for the next few minutes as my cousin Mark often submits in emails to friends and family, I will leave you with the music of a man whose originality won’t likely be matched in this lifetime or the next. I give you Prince.

From Debt to Dirt

photo: Dave Trainer


Our lifestyle today is a lifestyle of debt. Even just sitting in our house, we accrue debt. We turn on lights, we create a debt to the electric company. We get hungry, we have to buy food. We want to do anything, we need health insurance. We live a lifestyle that is very dependent on the social structure. Our lifestyle keeps us tied to this structure by keeping us in debt, all the time.

We know that even as we sleep, the moment we wake up, we will have to pay off this debt we owe society. Subconsciously, this debt slowly erodes our integrity. We don’t realize this though because we’ve grown so accustomed to this lifestyle of debt accrual.

The problem is, is that we have grown unhealthily dependent on our social structure. I imagine a life that is a bit more self-reliant given the means provided by the government. What are those means? I’ve figured out where I stand on that. Check out A Steady Job.

Something I hope to do in the mean time while the government is working itself out is to live a lifestyle that get communities in motion. To get a place in motion, it would make sense to start at the house – we all have a house, that’s a thing that many people have in common - a house.

The house I would want to live in would be one where I wake up to the sound of water running through my house, dripping into the roots of plants I’m growing so I don’t have to buy food from the store. A house where the slightest wind or solar rays are absorbed by modern machines built into my house so that I have no electric bill to pay. And in fact, if the renewable energy produced from my rooftop exceed my overall consumption, I would get money back from my electric company. I imagine going upstairs to my roof and grabbing eggs from my small chicken coop to make breakfast. Then I imagine taking a hot shower, where the water was heated naturally heated by a solar water heater also on my roof. When the water runs down the drain in the shower, I imagine the water… now greywater, running into a filter in my basement that would cleanse all of my greywater into water clean enough for my plants outside. Then, when I poop, instead of flushing X gallons of water back into the public plumbing system, I would throwing a handful of sawdust into my composting toilet. When I fill a 200L barrel with poop and sawdust and lime, I would cap the barrel and let it age for one year, afterwards producing fine fertilizer for my crops.

Even so, if you’re not the blue-collar farmer type of person, there are tremendous improvements that could be done to public utility lines in every city, town and village around the world that could make our lives easier.

I’m anxious to get started.

In the House

We spend our lives in two stages: you are either sleeping or you are awake. If you are sleeping, you are passing through some psychological realm people still don’t completely understand. If you’re awake though, you’re doing one of two things: doing something or not doing something.

If you’re doing something, you either like it or you don’t.
If you like it, you could either keep doing it or not keep doing it.
If you don’t like it, you could stop doing it, do something else or do nothing at all.

If you end up doing nothing at all, you either like it or you don’t.
If you like it, you could continue doing nothing. Or if you don’t, you could do something. Then you be back where we started.

The point is that there is no point. Unless you count keeping a conscious meter of how happy you are gauged by the things you do, as a point. I would count that as a point. Or I guess I should say, that is what I do when I’m awake, which may be something or nothing depending on who you ask, but I guess you’re asking me because you’re reading this. Either that or you’re just being nice.

Ka-Blam! a solar panel installation video

Here’s a video about a Peace Corps Partnership Project in a small village of Hortelão. Two volunteers, Sarah Mendlesohn and Andrew Vernaza collaborated on the financing, purchasing and installing of two solar panels to bring electricity to a small village for the first time, ever.